As The Company's iVotronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines Continue to Fail Across Her State, Betty Ireland Recognizes Recently-Resigned Exec Gary Greenhalgh for 'Pioneering Use of Technology in Election Process'

We wish we were kidding, but it seems that last Thursday, as ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines were failing across West Virginia (now reported in at least 6 different counties there), Secretary of State Betty Ireland was presenting an "award of merit" to ES&S vice-president Gary Greenhalgh...

A day after West Virginia secretary of state Betty Ireland held a press conference to address vote-switching problems with touchscreen voting machines made by Election Systems & Software, she presented an award of merit to an ES&S vice president, who had abruptly and mysteriously left the company in May after 11 years of service, according to the Charleston Gazette.

Gary Greenhalgh, as ES&S's vice president of sales, helped the company win a $17-million contract to supply machines to West Virginia in 2005 and was the company's point person for dealing with election officials until he left ES&S.

The Gazette's coverage tells us that Ireland, when giving Greenhalgh the award, recognized him as "a pioneer in the use of technology in the election process."

It was the ES&S iVotronic which "pioneered" the loss of some 18,000 votes in the Democratic-stronghold of Sarasota County, FL in 2006. The completely disappeared votes led to loss of Democrat Christine Jennings to her Republican opponent Vern Buchanan in the U.S. House race in Florida's 13th district by 369 votes.

The Gazette also goes on to remind us of just one of the many studies, Ohio's "EVEREST" analysis, which found the ES&S iVotronic touch-screens can be "compromised and modified without detection, conceivably occurring before, during or after an election," presenting "serious risks to election integrity."

That independent analysis led OH SoS Jennifer Brunner to recommend decertification of the ES&S iVotronic system. Apparently it led WV SoS Ireland to keep using them across the entire state and give the recently-resigned ES&S vice-president an award.

Links to our recent stories on ES&S vote-flips and other failures follows, along with our recommended list of steps to take should you find your vote flipping on one of these wholly unverifiable voting machines...

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